From the course: Computer Science Principles: The Internet

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Packets and fault tolerance

Packets and fault tolerance

From the course: Computer Science Principles: The Internet

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Packets and fault tolerance

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- Messages are broken down into small pieces of data called a packet. A packet consists of about a kilobyte of information, but if you're sending a long email, an audio file, or an image, that would require that the data is broken down into dozens or even hundreds of packets, or more. When these packets are sent out from the server, there are lots of conditions that can happen as they all navigate the roads of the internet. The chains of the packets will rarely stay together as a group, and will break apart, and take different paths along the internet. For instance, if we have a message that needs to be broken down into five packets, they start at the same location. But, as they are transmitted, they have to navigate the internet along with trillions of other packets of information, which can create traffic and bottlenecks at certain points. For instance, two packets might have been managed by a node on a network, but that node might have been overwhelmed by another request, making it…

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